spanghew

[prettygoodword]

spanghew (SPAHNG-hyoo) - v., to throw (a frog or toad) violently into the air.


Either at the end of a stick, or by striking it into jumping. Obsolete and rare before it went out of business, used exclusively in N. England and Scotland. I do not like what this word expresses, but I love that the word exists to express it. I mean seriously -- a verb for throwing a frog in the air. Well, there's a few instances known where something else is thrown, such as the rider of a horse, but still. Etymology is partly obscure: spang is a Scots dialect (and so also northernmost England) form of spring, but no one has a clue about the -hew.

---L.

Comments

[ranunculus]

Hew? Like the action of in cutting down a tree?

[prettygoodword]

And a few other mostly archaic meanings, none of which seem to fit.

[ranunculus]

I wonder if it came from the action of raising an axe back over one shoulder, something that might mimic the action of throwing a frog. A bit like the action of throwing a caber? Ok, so that might be stretching it, but it is fun to speculate.

[prettygoodword]

squints

Mayyyyyyybe?

[prettygoodword]

Apparently hew's PIE root had senses of both cut/chop and strike, and the latter apparently carried forward into Proto-Germanic -- which makes me wonder if it was still around in Old English, which would be late enough for survival into Scots. So originally striking a frog into jumping, later augmented into launching the frog off a stick to see whose would go further.

Just by way of speculation.

[full_metal_ox]

On one famous occasion, frog-tossing was absolutely necessary to the resolution of the story:



(Image description: an illustration from “The Frog Prince” by Walter Crane.

The Princess, a young woman in a yellow grapevine-patterned gown and long orange fingerless gloves, her red hair bound up in Grecian fashion, is sitting on her canopy bed whose sky-blue curtains bear a motif of crows amidst pink roses, with a sunflower at the apex; the frame is patterned with Cupids bearing flower garlands. Her right arm is upraised, vaguely suggesting the idea of tossing something, and her expression mildly puzzled—-as of an actress who does not have the security clearance to be forewarned of what the greenscreen artists are going to show her reacting to.

From her upraised hand emanates an opaque pale warm-colored magical cloud, serving as background for successive stages in the trajectory of a spanghewed frog: from right to left, a dorsal view of a fairly naturalistic upside-down spotted green frog; a three-quarters profile view of a cartoony green frog skewed in a song-and-dance position anticipating Michigan J. Frog from Looney Toons; that cartoony frog disassembling into separate puppet parts; those puppet parts transforming into cartoony green human parts; the sequence climaxes as the pieces resolve into a Prince standing before the Princess, doffing his ermine-trimmed russet cap with a gallant flourish. His curly amber-brown hair shades darker toward the back, and he has a pencil-thin moustache; his green tunic is patterned with sunflowers echoing his prior frog spotting (as well as the sunflower on the Princess’s canopy ceiling.)

This is Art Nouveau self-indulgence at its finest—as well as a masterful use of complementary colors, here orange and blue, bridged by the whole gamut of analogous colors between: yellow-orange, yellow, yellow-green, green, and blue-green. (If such a color scheme has a technical name, I’d love to know it, and 1word1day would be a great place to share it.)


(Grumbles about how you specifically have to exclude “Disney” from fairytale web searches any more.)

*

[minoanmiss]

That picture made me very happy!

[med_cat]

LOL yep I remember this one :P

[prettygoodword]

I know very little about the names of color schemes in English. (Classical Japanese had loads, and I could never keep track of what's in even the most commonly named ones.)